The Critic

This short film by Ernest Pintoff is probably the funniest short ever made. It stars Mel Brooks as an Old Man from Russia who watches a series of abstract cartoons. He can make neither head nor tail of them, and comments outrageously the entire time, much to the disturbance of the other patrons. Here is some of the earliest Brooks humor, and already it keeps your rolling in the aisles! Produced in association with Brooks' Crossbow Productions (the precursor of Brooksfilms).

This Oscar-winning 4-minute cartoon beat the recently-viewed AUTOMANIA 2000 (1963), which I had rated ***1/2! That said, it is a classic and undeniably original. The premise could not be simpler: a grumpy critic on the soundtrack – voiced by a pre-stardom Mel Brooks! – assesses a variety of shapes that come up on the screen. He is understandably exasperated by their constant striving for attention or, if you like, to create meaning (which is often indecipherable anyway!) out of nonsense. It is a pretty sharp and witty jab at art-house cinema, then in something of a worldwide creative peak, which found the adulation of intellectual film reviewers but were deemed pretentious by – and went over the heads of – mainstream American audiences. Conversely, however, this can also be seen as an indictment of the unsophisticated tastes of casual moviegoers.

I saw The Critic in the mid-70's as a short before some comedy, and while I don't remember the movie it preceded, I'll never forget Pintoff's tiny gem of a film. The v/o commentary that accompanies the very 60's-era (and very European) abstract animation is the funniest narration I have ever heard in any film -- long or short -- and nobody, NOBODY could have delivered it better than Mel Brooks. The magic of the whole concept is that you truly do feel like the old geezer is sitting right next to you in the theater -- a masterful stroke of comedic/filmic genius. It's a crying shame that The Critic appears to be out of circulation...

At first I didn't understand anything about the work (mainly because I'm Brazilian, I don't have subtitles and I still understand little English), however, when I listened more carefully and tried to know the context in which the work was conceived, I understood the message that is a joke with all of us lovers of the seventh art.

I was so glad I finally got to see this online (again, via you-tube), because it's an incredible shot of comedy from the sharp-as-a-Jewish-tack mind of Mel Brooks. It's like Brooks stumbled into an avant-garde theater showing an underground short, like a slightly more sophisticated Brakhage short. Which makes it all the more uproarious, because these sorts of films DO take themselves way too seriously as art sometimes (sometimes the symbolism is deep and meaningful, but other times, as Brooks's old man comments that it's meaning is junk). We also get the insight that it's, of course, a "dirty picture" as he sees two amorphous shapes come together and "bond" in the ways that only abstract images from avant-garde filmmakers can do. But of course the director Pintkoff is in on the joke too, and shapes his movie in order to suit Brooks's lashings, despite the 'others' in the theater that just want silence. I think maybe a part of me just found it funny, in the first few minutes I mean, because it was Brooks doing such an over-the-top Russian caricature. But there's many, many great zingers in there, the kind that provided me the same belly laughs I had from the classics the Producers and Blazing Saddles. Though for some, since it's onlt 3 1/2 minutes long, there won't be much in the way of "story" to get in the way. It's just a cranky old man fobbing off on 60s experimental film-making- and an old man that could criticize anything any day of the week and make hilarious!